Dyslexia, Dysgraphia and Writing

I have had several requests lately in helping students with writing. This can be a struggle for dyslexics. Dysgraphia usually plays a part in the struggle of writing for dyslexics. Dysgraphia is of Greek origin. Dys is a prefix that means "impaired". Graphia is a base word that means "letter form", "hand", or "making letter forms by hand". So, students with dysgraphia are impaired in letter writing skills. They might have difficulty in 1)legibility, 2)automaticity-how legible they can write in a timely manner, or 3)speed-how much time it takes them to complete a writing task. Because of any one of these struggles, the process of getting thoughts onto paper is difficult.
In preparation to help these students, I am reading, "Teaching Students with Dyslexia and Dysgraphia, Lessons from Teaching and Science", by Virginia W. Berninger and Beverly J. Wolf. I will also attend a few conferences that will help me on my writing journey.
My goal is to blog my findings and discoveries as I read and attend conferences in order to develop a plan for teaching writing this summer.
Hope this will help you in your classrooms, private tutoring, etc.
Sherri :)

Powerful Reading and the Reading Notebook

I have started something new this year with my dyslexic students and I am calling it "Powerful Reading".  They have all loved it and look forward to Fridays each week! 
This summer I read "Notebook Connections, Strategies for the Reader's Notebook" by Aimee Buckner.  I was so inspired while reading this wealth of information about helping students become deeper thinkers, readers and writers.  I look forward to Fridays as much as my students do. 
With my 3rd graders, I am reading to them and we are listening for "great writing" - which would be the literary element introduced that week.  This week: Foreshadowing.  I am reading the Sister's Grimm series to my students and it is full of literary elements.  Sometimes it is hard to just stick with one! 
My 4th graders are surprising me each week with the comprehension and growth in their reading. 
As the students read, we have been working on "capturing" our great thoughts while reading.  We do this by using small post-it notes and writing great thoughts about the text - could be a connection they make with the text, or a questions about what might happen, a literary element recognition, etc.  4th grade seems to be a great age to really begin digging in a little deeper into reading.
I tell my students from the beginning that it is impossible to not think while reading, so "tune in" to their great thoughts!
 I also shared with them my "Truths about Reading" which are:
*Great Books are meant to be read over and over.
*Picture Books are not just for babies.
*Short chapters have benefits.
*You can depend on a favorite author
Afterwords, the students came up with their Truths about Reading and that was our very first entry in our Reader's Notebook.

If you are a teacher, I highly recommend Aimee Buckner's book!  You will be inspired to incorporate it in whatever grade level you teach.  I have put a link below for quick access to her book on Amazon.com.

Happy Reading, Everyone!
http://www.amazon.com/

What is a good teacher to do??

I ended my last blog with a charge for teachers to take the time to identify their students with reading difficulties. I'd like to share some ideas to help you follow through in helping these students become fluent and accurate readers.

Sadly, there are time constraints on teachers to effectively implement effective reading strategies for students to become successful readers in fluency, rate, and comprehension. So, in writing this, I do realize that most teachers will have to be incredibly creative and, at the same time, understand and value the importance of giving each of their struggling readers the opportunity to become successful readers.

First, listen to your students read aloud in order to make judgments about their progress in reading fluency. As you do this, consider the critical aspects of fluent reading: word-reading accuracy, rate, and prosody.

There are many different ways to measure a student's word-reading accuracy. Simply listening to oral reading and counting the number of errors per 100 words. Through careful examination of error patterns, you can decide which strategies the student is using and which they are failing to use. For example, how the student attempts to figure out an unknown word will give you an idea of their phonemic blending, a guess made based on context, or a combination of decoding and contextual analysis. SRA, DRA and Guided Reading programs are an excellent source of curriculm to aid in this instruction.

Assessing reading rate is best done through contextual reading rather than reading a list of words. measuring rate should include automaticity and reading speed in connected text. Timed reading of a student's reading of connected text allows young observe the number of words read correctly and the number of errors made in a given time frame. If you are the kind of teacher that is good at gathering info on your students, then you won't mind this next suggestion...record a baseline for each struggling student on their first timed reading. Set a goal with the student for the next reading. Timings should be done at least three times per week in order to build consistency. When the student levels of and is no longer increasing, it is time to select a new passage. You want to keep the student on the same passage until they level off in accuracy and rate. Keep the student engaged in doing their best each reading by having them set a goal for each reading.

Assessing prosody can be accomplished at the same time as rate and accuracy during the timed readings. Prosody is the student's inflection, expression and phrase boundaries. Comprehension improves as a student's prosody improves. Prosody usually is the last of the fluency elements to develop. But, as accuracy and rate develop at the independent level, you will begin to hear prosody emerge. Prosody will develop in the later repeated timed readings at the independent level. One element builds on another. When accuracy is addressed, rate improves, and the prosody. With all of this coming together for a struggling reader is such a success and confidence builder!! Reading comprehension automatically improves as these fluency elements come together.

Hope everyone has a great week of reading successes!

It's snowing here today, so I spent some time reading a great article "Reading fluency assessment and instruction: What, why and how?"

Research has demonstrated the importance of fluency in the development of reading proficiency, and a variety of effective methods for the assessment and instruction of it have been developed.

Lack of reading fluency is a reliable predictor of reading comprehension problems. A labored, disconnected fashion with focus on decoding at the word level makes comprehension of the text difficult, if not impossible.
School districts are deciding to do away with a spelling program, per say, and believe that if a great writing program is implemented throughout all the subjects, that students will incidentally or automatically become great spellers and readers. Although this may be true for about 1% of students in an entire district, it is not a fact for the other 99%. Struggling readers may not gain reading fluency incidentally or automatically. Struggling readers need:
*direct instruction in word reading. Without accurate word reading, the reader will have no access to the author's intend meaning.
*opportunities for intense, fluency focused practice incorporated into their reading/writing program.
The benefit? Automaticity in one aspect of reading frees the processing space for higher order thinking. Now comprehension is much more easily accomplished.
Concerned teachers wanting to meet the needs of all students in their classroom should consider whether they can identify their dysfluent readers and what type of instruction they plan to provide for those readers.